Bonnitta Roy’s Process-Based Critique of Complexity

Bonnitta Roy's project identifies a structural tension within Complexity science: despite its commitment to dynamic, emergent phenomena, the field routinely reifies its subject matter — treating processes as bounded objects amenable to third-person observation from a position exterior to the system. This is not mere methodological sloppiness but an Ontological default, inherited from the Cartesian architecture underlying most scientific inquiry. Roy's intervention is to hybridize Complexity science with Process philosophy in the tradition of Whitehead, Hartshorne, and Griffin — a lineage that treats becoming, not being, as the primary Ontological catEgory.

The conceptual move parallels Einstein's dissolution of gravitational force as a third-term entity: rather than positing something that acts between masses, general relativity redescribes gravity as the curvature of spacetime — motion with respect to motion, with no privileged inertial frame. Process philosophy generalizes this gesture: nothing is de-animated, no vantage point stands outside the relational field, and every act of observation is itself an event within the system being observed.

Roy's synthesis produces what she terms 'Insight practice' — a metacognitive discipline that interrogates the boundary conditions of any given inquiry. What does the circle of thinking include and exclude? What constraints are structural rather than empirical? The practice operates as a double movement: theoretical insight opens the complexity space by dissolving hidden Reifications, while effective action in the world simplifies and focuses the search space. The aim is not to generate new content within an existing Paradigm but to perform genuine framework expansion — unbinding the Ontological assumptions that constrain what Complexity science can see.